The Skeptics Guide #931 - May 13 2023 (Ad Free)
Added 2023-05-13 15:37:34 +0000 UTCQuickie with Bob: Pangenome; News Items: Fake Studies, Germany and Nuclear Power, Moon Landing Hoax Again, Earth Viewed by Alien Civilization; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: Dunning-Kruger Revisited; Science or Fiction
Comments
I also found thing on Skeptoid: https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4687 And this report linked there: https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/attach/2015/11/Cleaner-Cars-from-Cradle-to-Grave-full-report.pdf
Asymetra
2023-05-19 13:35:14 +0000 UTCThanks for sharing. I did crosscheck the CO2 thing with Skeptoid (https://skeptoid.com/blog/2011/06/17/electric-cars-not-really-green/), but that's from 2011. Is this still the case? While there are some other issues with electric vehicles, I suspect that we'll find a way to reduce the impact of batteries by recycling them. As China continues to expand it's grasp on rare earth minerals, rising costs, I suspect, should encourage research in recovering materials (which will probably cause other issues). It seems when money is the driving issue (not environment), we are incentivized to respond. Another thing to consider with electric cars is noise, if all other things are equal, quieter cars can improve life. Of course an anti-quiet-electric-car industry will rise up claiming that quiet cars are killing our children ("Won't someone please think of the children!!!!").
Asymetra
2023-05-19 13:30:06 +0000 UTCI am glad to be a member of the Proud Order of Novids. Also, I have a large supply of non perishables, including two 20lb sacks of dried pinto beans. From now on, no more large indoor crowds for me. I don't have any problem with keeping existing nuclear plants running. My only objection to nuclear is the cost of power plant construction, especially considering that many of the materials used cannot be recycled because they were made radioactive, and the land that is used is also useless for a long period of time. The cost of getting the same megawatt hours per year from solar + wind + STORAGE (including pumping water behind Lake Meade) is much lower, and the time to construct it is much shorter. The amount of CO2 emitted per passenger mile from an electric car charged with electricity from coal is less than a gas powered one because of the inefficiency of internal combustion engines. This, however, ignores the amount of CO2 emitted when the two vehicles are produced. Are you sure that our grid really is as messed up as you say it is? I have never heard of this before. I knew that Florida could not use pumped water storage in Canada (something I used to think we could do), but it is impossible for it to connect any wind and solar? How did Babcock Ranch do it? Were they on a waiting list for 20 years after paying $20 million to get in line? I am totally lost. I don't understand why I have never heard of this before. I wonder if hydrogen gas turbines are the answer. The real value of hydrogen is large scale utility storage. Excess energy can be used to split hydrogen from water. (Supercapacitors and batteries can smooth out fluctuations.) store it in large containers near the point of use, then it can run hydrogen gas turbines, or mix with at least 25% methane and you can run natural gas turbines. You can always do this where pumped storage (PWS) is unavailable - which is a lot of places, Florida for example. Basically, it works like this. Supercapacitors handle the shortest fluctuations of supply and demand, after that you have batteries, after that you have your long term storage. PWS is the best for this, but you must have the right available terrain. Hydrogen gas turbine plants can go anywhere. They also have the same land footprint and power capacity of natural gas plants, in fact they can be converted natural gas plants, Maybe the first thing we need to do is convert them then use wind farms waiting to connect to use the wind to produce hydrogen which can be shipped by truck or rail to them. (There are special containers that do this, and they are much safer than gasoline or propane tanks of the same energy output because hydrogen quickly rises away when released.) Heck, you can do this with the natural gas plants we have right now! Round trip efficiency of hydrogen gas turbines is only 60%, so you would need to produce more solar electricity than if you had PWS everywhere, but the low cost of production more than makes up for it, making the total cost still cheaper than what we have now. Another thing I thought of. If any wind or solar place is close enough to a hydroelectric plant, they can pump water behind it. No need to connect to the grid. The biggest thing any ET's would notice about Earth would be the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere. I think I am above average in knowledge in some subjects, lower in others.
Ted Apelt
2023-05-13 18:43:23 +0000 UTC
